BECAUSE March 19 this year fell on a Lenten Sunday, the solemnity of St. Joseph was celebrated last March 20. Just the same, the occasion offers us a timely reminder of this great man whose life gives us precious lessons. He has not become passé at all.
These are lessons of how one’s simple station in life can be made a vehicle to carry out God’s sublime designs for all of us. What is needed is simply to have faith in God and to live it consistently in one’s life. Ideally, there should be no gaps.
Yes, dear, one of the basic things we need to be clear about is that our life is never just our own. It by definition, by our condition, is a life to be spent and developed always with God. We would be in some void if we were to live without God.
Thus, everything in our life, even the apparently insignificant, needs a divine dimension for it to be meaningful and helpful to us. This is the mentality that we should cultivate. Religion is never just a niche in our life. It has to be our life’s soul, affecting everything we are and do.
The problem we have at present is that we often find ourselves just doing things on our own, pursuing our own goals, bloated with our own idea of self-importance. God is literally set aside, ignored and resorted to only as a matter of formality. We can only reap trouble from this.
This is, of course, a funny situation, but we succumb to it effortlessly. We may not openly profess atheism or agnosticism, but our mentality and behavior just betray such anomaly.
St. Joseph led a very fulfilling life even if spent in quiet and hidden service to God in pursuit of the divine plan of our redemption. There was hardly anything extraordinary in his life.
He just made himself available for whatever task was needed to advance God’s work for and with men. It did not matter to him if the task was big or small. It was the same for him whether he had to stay in a certain place or go to some foreign land.
He highlighted the importance of the “supporting role” that is always needed in any human endeavor. And because of this, he accomplished a very important task in the whole economy of human salvation.
The problem we have is that many of us are just infatuated with taking the “leading role,” no matter what it takes. This is truly shameless, when the indispensable attitudes of humility and meekness are simply ignored.
This can be clearly seen in the world of entertainment and politics. Perhaps because of the nature of such activities, there is a certain susceptibility of the characters involved to fill themselves with self-importance, grabbing attention whenever possible.
This is truly lamentable. While politics and entertainment are always necessary because of our human condition, they now seem less and less meant for the pursuit of the common good. They have simply become the arena for lust of power and for vanity.
The worlds of politics and entertainment now seem to have lost their proper
sense of purpose. Their actors are now engaging in fierce, brutal battles, inhuman and degrading, often using a language full of poison and deception.
Conflicts and division are generated. There’s a lot of intrigue-making, bickering, gossiping, raising tension everywhere.
There is a need to learn the example of St. Joseph. This is the only way to at least recover our sanity and to have a good measure of peace in our human affairs. We have to learn how to be simple and calm as we go about our business and politics.
It is an example that is articulated in the Church’s social doctrine, where the ways of prudence and dialogue are spelled out. If only we could just take the bother to study it…we can be spared many of the useless troubles exploding in many places today.
No comments:
Post a Comment